Student's corner

Abhishek Chaudhary, 3rd year student of MIT College of Engineering, Pune

More than the idea, it is the successful initiative by TERRE Policy Centre to bring this Smart Campus into reality through latest technologies, that takes it one step ahead of being just another environmental organisation.

The recent launch of the SCCN project at the MIT campus in Pune marked the milestone. Having a big campus like MIT which produces green energy from a large number of solar panels certainly brings a concern about how systematically the energy is being consumed within the campus. With the energy meters installed by SmartSense, one can now log in to the platform to see how much of the energy and water have been used in the campus, making an easy way for monitoring their consumption and optimizing.

What makes it more interesting is that it is completely automised. There is no one sitting out there collecting the data from the energy meters and uploading it to the cloud platform. The energy meters are sending their data or rather communicating with the cloud platform all by themselves without any human intervention and therefore, without any error.

Along with MIT, there should be many other campuses where the SmartSense energy meters must be installed, creating a healthy competition with each other in terms of energy efficiency.

This absolutely gives hope that the advances in science and the cleverness of upcoming technologies and digitization are proving to be auspicious and not destructive for the environment, exactly serving the purpose of the United Nations' SDGs. This surely is an encouraging move for most of the programmers and technologists to come up with ideas that can help us cope up with the problems associated with the climate change.

I am sure thousands of presentations have been made about the climate change and global warming but an initiative like SCCN, is what is going to bring us closer to the goals that the United Nations and all of us are aiming for.